Campus Audits of Employees Take Hold

As pressure has built on colleges and universities to prove their performance to increasingly questioning external audiences, many institutions have realized that they must start by better understanding their own strengths and weaknesses.

That has led increasing numbers of individual institutions, public university systems (like the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities), and state higher education entities (like Indiana’s Commission of Higher Education) to collect and organize data from massive and complex data warehouses in easily digestible forms, resulting in an explosion of dashboards and other mechanisms. Most of them relate to things such as finances, facilities and, increasingly, student persistence.

This week’s annual conference of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources suggested that the concept might be about to take off in another realm: assessing performance of campus employees.